It's been a while since my last entry, and there are a lot of things I
want to write about. Fortunately, most of them will keep.

Much of the past two weeks was taken up with our Ghostscript staff
meeting, our exhibit at the Seybold show, and the various preparation
and followup.

One of the nicest things about the time was to have fellow hackers
stay with us, first Ralph Giles, then Tor Andersson. The kids
got to spend time with both, and I think it was very enriching for
them, and I hope enjoyable for our guests.

In fact, this was the first time meeting Tor in person. I'm really
enjoying working with him - it's clear we have many goals in common.
We had a few days of very intense discussion, covering the good and
bad in TeX, the Fitz design (of course), and many meditations on the
way software should be built.

Silliness

I've enjoyed drinking from a Sun Java mug since I first became its
proud owner, back when Sun was making the original push. A few days
ago, Sun announced the "Java Desktop", with all kinds of neat
indemnification for its buyers. A few days ago, the handle broke off
of my Java mug. I have never dropped it and didn't abuse it in any
way, just mostly used it for nuking water for tea. Is there a causal
relation between these two events?

I come up with all kinds of funny things in my dreams, but rarely such
a good pun as this one: it's clear that discount merchandising needs
its own XML language for describing the various flavors of clearance
sales, everyday discounts, and so on. Thus, I propose "Markdown Markup
language". It's a shame I didn't hook up with Tim Bray at Seybold; we
were both
there, and I'm sure he would have gotten a chuckle out of it.